Visual Novel / Island

Let me tell you the legend of this island: it's a story of tragic love.

Urashima is an island far from the mainland. The people who live there lead carefree lives. But five years ago, the island's three great families suffered a series of misfortunes, and succumbed to suspicion. The people of the island cut off all contact with the mainland, and began a slow decline. One day, a young man named Setsuna washes ashore claiming to be a time-traveler and suffering from amnesia. He meets three local girls: Sara, Rinne, and Karen. Their meeting will change the course of the island's fate.

An animated adaptation aired in July 1, 2018 as part of the Summer lineup. Funimation's Simuldub of the anime series premiered on July 21st, 2018. Watch it here.

SPOILER ALERT: Almost all the hidden text below contains enormous spoilers regarding the nature of the time-traveling mystery. You have been warned.

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This visual novel and its animated adaptation contain examples of:

• 12-Episode Anime: Which inevitably leads to some major compression.
• Abusive Parents: With the exception of Kuon, almost every parental figure in the story has either, neglected, abandoned or used their offspring to further their goals. Moritsugu (Karen's father) is a perfect example of this trope. Norimasa is a close second, as he used to abuse his own son, just because he wasn't born a girl.
• Accidental Pervert: Karen stumbles upon a naked Setsuna during their first encounter.
• A-Cup Angst: Sara. Despite being 16 years old, she has quite a childish figure. Averted with her distant descendant, who mentions she had a growth spurt at 18 years of age. It is implied Sara will go through this as well.
• Adaptational Curves: Both Karen and Rinne have noticeably larger chests in the anime adaptation. (In the Visual Novel, All the heroines sans Sarah are quite flat.)
• After the End: The ISLAND subterranean cities are humanity's last refuge against the ice age that rages for several thousand years. It is implied that the one Setsuna travels to, might very well be the last one standing.
• Afraid of Blood: When Sara tries to attack Setsuna, she trips and gets a nosebleed. When she notices she screams in panic.
• Alternate Self: Setsuna and Rinne have met their many future reincarnations vía cryogenic sleep time travel.
• Ambiguously Gay: Momoka and Subaru. While Momoka never denies her homosexuality, she doesn't actually confirms it. Subaru never drops the hint but considering Taro knows, it might not be much of a secret, although the Kurutsus are entirely unaware. Until Setsuna hilariously and unintentionally blows his cover during Karen's route, that is.
• Amnesiac Hero: Setsuna remembers nothing when he wakes up at Urashima, and even his name seems to belong to someone else.
• Amnesia Loop: Setsuna rides this trope so hard.
• Apocalypse How: The entire Winter chapter takes place inside the ISLAND city, an underground refuge for the last remnants of humanity 20,000 years into the future, where an ice age is ravaging the planet.
• Arc Words: "I'm not your Setsuna."
• Armor-Piercing Question: Sara asks Karen whether going to the mainland would really allow her to easily find her dreams.
• Big Fancy House: Rinne's house. So much that even Karen, who comes from another of the three families, envies it a lot.
• Bittersweet Ending: The RE: ending. Although it's implied Setsuna and Rinne eventually got together for good.
• Break the Cutie: Sara. She goes through a lot.
• Broken Bird: Sara is a textbook example.
• But Now I Must Go: Setsuna resolves to help Rinne finish her time machine during the RE: Ending. And after doing all he can he then decides to cryo-sleep into the future once more so he can test the machine once it's completed. It's unclear how far into the future he goes but one secret CGI at the Gallery implies that he eventually stays with Rinne; for good.
• Canon Foreigner: Emiri, An and Mei are characters exclusive to the Anime adaptation. They don't appear at all in the Visual Novel.
• Can't Take Anything with You: In the game, this is left implied by Setsuna waking up on Urashima naked. The anime makes this more clear by showing the cryo pod being used this way to begin with and showing Rinné arriving in the past naked as well. Nevertheless, they're still able to take a CD with them.
• Chekhov's Gun: The data CD that Setsuna has with him at the beginning of the game, turns out to be blueprints for a time machine. The actual origin of it is never revealed.
• Chekhov's Skill: after endless leaps into the future trying to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, Setsuna manages to retain his memories, allowing him to fix one of the many futures he's traveled into.
• Chick Magnet: Setsuna. Either it's his carefree and amicable nature or how easy he is to trust and approach, but Setsuna has little trouble winning the heroine's hearts. Sadly, he doesn't seem to be particularly interested in any of them Except for Rinne.
• Chivalrous Pervert: Setsuna, though the chivalrous part doesn't show up very often. When he claims to be allergic to tatami, Karen offers to let Setsuna enter her room. Setsuna then quickly claims that he loves tatami to death,
• Chuunibyou: After waking up on the island, Setsuna claims to everyone that he is a time traveller from the future whose objective is to save the world. It is this trope.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Sara and Setsuna. Big time. At first, anyway. While Sara is clearly a fan of the occult and crafts a ton of theories, she's always off the mark. Setsuna's ramblings, however, end up being true in the end.
• Cold Sleep, Cold Future: Setsuna is cryogenically frozen in hopes of ending up in a future advanced enough to have a time machine to return to 1999 with. The 22016 he wakes up in is quite the Crapsack World, and it ends up being quite a literal example of a cold future as the future is crapsack in part because of an ice age that has made the surface of Earth uninhabitable. He is, on the other hand, lucky to be rescued by The Pollyanna of the era.
• Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Right after washing up at Urashima, Setsuna infers he comes from the future and his mission is to save the world.
• Crapsack World: The ISLAND city system as a whole. People can't go outside lest they be killed by the blizzard, there's barely any food and the power plant that controls the climate inside the city is on its last legs. To top it all off, the Church distributes rations and jobs selectively and riots and crime are punished swiftly and severely. Those without access to rations or employment have to steal to survive and girls as young as 9 are forced to do sexual favors just to eat.
• Cute and Psycho: Sara is bent on killing Setsuna at first, her reasoning behind it is rather fuzzy too. Despite almost always being played for laughs, She actually kills him in 2 bad endings. The first one is right when Setsuna meets her. She stabs Setsuna in cold blood and all she does is laugh creepily. The second one is even worse, as an arbitrary set of choices triggers a psychotic episode and she repeatedly stabs Setsuna to death during her route.
• Dead Person Impersonation: Setsuna and Rinne. Setsuna impersonates both Ohara Setsuna (although unintentionally) and O'hara Setsuna. Both are long dead when this happens, naturally. And Rinne impersonates the deceased Ohara Kuon in order to keep the family's Matriarchal system intact.
• Destructive Savior: Setsuna. No matter what future he's in or how good his intentions are, everything goes to hell once he gets involved. He manages to save one of the many futures he visits, but that's just one of countless. Oddly, no one ever mentions this, not even Setsuna himself.
• Did You Just Have Sex?: Played for laughs after Setsuna and Rinne do the deed. He even tells to himself how size doesn't matter much in the end.
• Disaster Scavengers: "The collarless" who live in the slums of the ISLAND city. They are not given rations or a job due to shortages so they have to make do however they can.
• Does Not Like Men: Momoka. She spares no time making this clear right after you meet her.
• "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune: Rinne's voice actress Yukari Tamura sings the anime's opening song.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: In order to get the RE: ending (which is the true ending of the game), you need to see all the good endings in order, replay a story segment and then clear a set of choices to trigger it.
• The Ending Changes Everything: After Sestuna finally gains enough Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, it's revealed near the very end of the story that he's never been time traveling after all, just taking The Slow Path in a universe in which events find a way to closely repeat themselves given enough time. This twist was cited as ruining the entire story for fans of the anime in particular for its seemingly unintentional Shoot the Shaggy Dog nature, especially since there's no time left in the story to deal with the consequences by that point.
• Eskimos Aren't Real: When Sara jokingly suggests that the mainland may not exist, Karen buys into the scepticism immediately.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Played with when, despite everything falling apart in the future and Setsuna's main goal just being to get back home, it's revealed that the "alternate", future Rinne, was his "original" Rinne all along.
  • Ultimately played straight however, when it's revealed that Setsuna has never been time traveling, only moving forward, just that history almost quite literally repeats itself. The terrifying fact that this means that every horrific alternate outcome of events remained real and were never undone for those versions of his friends is given only the most passing of acknowledgements.
• Fake-Out Fade-Out: When Setsuna contemplates suicide for breaking an expensive vase, the game screen displays an ending screen in the same format as any other ending.
• Fanservice: Aside from a few cleavage and posterior shots, the visual novel is pretty lacking in the service department. The Anime adaptation on the other hand...
• Faux Shadow: The game has a hefty amount of info-dumping on quantum mechanics and relativity theory, yet outside of world-building it has little influence in the plot. In the end, the cryo-tube is the Deus ex Machina which is used for time traveling and has little to no scientific basis on the aforementioned concepts.
• Feuding Families: The three ruling families of Urashima. Moritsugu is particularly hostile towards the Oharas.
• Fish out of Temporal Water: Setsuna is this trope incarnate. He's a time traveler always stranded on a distant future which makes quite difficult to confirm his actual origin. The RE: Ending heavily implies that the original Setsuna might have lived in Urashima hundreds of thousands of years ago.
• First Kiss: Setsuna claims to have had his first kiss with Karen in a dark room. (Which, while misleading out of context, is true.)
• Fridge Horror: The game tends to end immediately after a bad ending, leaving things to your imagination, but if you do use your imagination, some of them end up pretty disturbing. For instance, either time Sara can kill Setsuna, she very messily kills him in the Ohara mansion. No matter what Rinne thought of Setsuna at the time, finding out an acquaintance of hers created a bloody murder scene in her house would be a pretty traumatizing experience, and she's already missing memories due to trauma (and considering she's the one who pressured Setsuna into answering the door, she'd probably feel personal guilt). What would Karen think when she finds out her friend killed someone with her knife? What would her father think and how would that affect her already troubled life? That's not even getting into Sara's psychology around the whole thing, since her route shows that she's willing to kill herself over paranoia that she'll become a murderer, let alone if she actually became one.
  • What really solidifies the Fridge Horror is the last minute reveal in the game that Setsuna has never been changing history, it's merely that very similar events recur across time. The game glosses over the implications of that reveal, but it means that the horrifying consequences of the bad endings (including Rinne's main route) actually happened and those versions of the characters were left to deal with the fallout even if the player was spared having to see it. There's a reason the Golden Ending is listed under Bittersweet Ending despite the game treating it as fairly happy.
• Gratuitous English: For laughs.
  Setsuna: What's your name?
  Karen: (In Japanese) Do you think I'm an idiot? Doesn't that mean 'What's your name?'?
  Setsuna: Nooooooo!! Answer in English!!!!!
  Karen: Oh, oh... My name is Karen.
  Setsuna: Oh shit! What a fuckin pronunciation! Again!!
• Genre Savvy: One of the time travelling methods Setsuna is familiar with and repeatedly refers to is exactly the choice system in visual novels.
• Golden Ending: The RE: ending.
• Good with Numbers: Sara and Setsuna.
• Grandfather Paradox: Sara during her route. Half this and half a causality paradox. She somehow infers that she is destined to give birth to herself by going back in time and marrying her father. She's totally wrong.
• G-Rated Sex: Characters make a suggestive remark and the screen fades to black, naturally. (It's an "all ages" game after all.)
  • Averted in Episode 10 of the anime, when Setsuna and Winter Rinne have sex before Setsuna enters the time machine.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: On a large scale. In the story's world, humanity is doomed to repeat an endless time cycle spanning 20,000 years, where civilization thrives for a time, becomes advanced enough to create time travel and then ultimately perishes when an ice age hits the planet. This happens again every 20 thousand years ad nauseam. (It is implied by Momoka that this loop could have happened due to misuse of time travel, but there's no way to confirm it.)
• Happily Ever After: Karen, Sara and Rinne's routes end like this. With either the prospect of marriage or an actual wedding taking place.
• Have We Met?: The lady at Ryuuguu to Setsuna.
• Hikikomori: Kuon Ohara locks herself in her room and prefers to communicate with visitors with written notes. Because she has contracted a serious skin disease, and does not want anyone to see her in broad daylight.
• Identity Impersonator: Rinne so much. After waking up at Urashima she's found by the Oharas who hire her as their servant. After Norimasa's wife Kuon passes away in some accident, she is instructed to assume her identity which she readily accepts. She never drops the act. At least not till the RE: Ending.
  • Setsuna does this at every future he travels to. During the Urashima timeline, he assumes the identity of Ohara Setsuna, his daughter Rinne's dead sweetheart, although he doesn't know at first. And during the Winter chapter he passes himself off as Rinne's older brother O'hara Setsuna. Both the Setsunas he impersonates have absolutely nothing to do with him, not in looks, personality or genetics.
• Idiot Hair: Funnily enough, Mei grows a cowlick when a storm is approaching.
• If It's You, It's Okay: Setsuna says that if Karen insults him, it's okay.
• In Medias Res: The anime adaptation skips ahead in the Winter Route as a result of having to compress it into just two episodes. It starts a little ways in, then rushes to the end, and only ever establishes how the characters got there through flashbacks and montages.
• Manchild: Kuon wears childrens' clothes, including a hood with animal horns, draws a heart at the end of each line in her notes, and talks in an immature manner.
• Killing Your Alternate Self: Early in the game Setsuna has memory flashes of someone saying he's going to kill "Setsuna". In other words, himself. Later during the Winter chapter, we learn that in fact it was Setsuna who said this after traveling to the future and plans to use Rinne's time machine to fix everything by killing his past self, so that both of them never meet each other and Rinne can live relatively peacefully. He drops the idea later though.
  • During Rinne's route, thanks to Sara's ridiculous theories, Setsuna thinks he traveled to the past at some point to kill himself. This is entirely false.
• Lost Technology: The time machine and the ruins of the ISLAND city.
• Love Hurts: Just ask Setsuna and Rinne.
• Madwoman in the Attic: Sara. This doesn't help the fact that she's already quite mentally disturbed.
• Meaningful Name: Rinne and Setsuna.
• Meaningful Rename: Rinne and Rinne (As well as Karin Kurz, Karen Kurutsu and Sara Garando, Sarah Garland.)
• Merging the Branches: The anime adaptation slightly reworks Sara and Karen's Routes to happen within Rinne's Route so the story can be more linear.
• Messy Hair: Sara's hair is relatively short but unkempt.
• Multiple Endings: 17 of them. Many are bad ones.
• Mum Looks Like a Sister: Kuon, naturally.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Setsuna every time you trip a bad ending flag.
• Mysterious Note: Setsuna finds one in Rinne's father's book, published ten year prior: Setsuna must die.
• Naked People Are Funny: Setsuna being beaten up by kids on the beach, then getting questioned by Harisu. Then meeting Kuon naked for the first time and taking her to Harisu. Then stripping on the beach in front of Sara and Karen, after Karen stripped off her maid suit to reveal her bikini.
• Non-Standard Game Over: Any of the bad endings.
• Next Sunday A.D.: The Urashima timeline. Everything indicates it happens during the summer of 1999 A.D., but in truth the actual year might be 250,000 A.D. or more. See "Groundhog Day" Loop entry.
• No Sense of Direction: Setsuna.
• Not a Morning Person: Setsuna, to the point that Karen has to wake him up.
• Our Time Travel Is Different: From past to the future only. The cryogenic tube the marine researchers find near Urashima allows the occupant to freeze him/herself and wake up in the distant future.
• Parental Incest: Setsuna and his daughter Rinne develop a romantic relationship, sleep together and during Rinne's route even get married. To be fair, Setsuna wasn't aware of this fact. Chillingly, during the RE: Ending, Rinne heavily implies that she figured this out at some point. Considering her ending, she doesn't seem to mind.
• Oblivious to Love: Setsuna. Justified since he has no memory and doesn't remember how much he's head over heels with Rinne. He subconsciously shoots down other prospects due to this however.
• Plot Hole: Rife with them. In the end it sort of works itself out, but many loose ends have to be settled with educated speculation.
• Priceless Ming Vase: Setsuna breaks one and thinks that he gets fired by Rinne.
• Red Herring: Ohara Setsuna, the actual heir of the Ohara family was neglected and hidden from public eye due to Urashima's matriarchal model. His role in the story seems important as he is regarded as the "original" Setsuna and was Rinne's first crush, but as clarified in the Mid-summer chapter, he is not related at all to the Setsuna we know and play as. He's there to throw clever speculators off.
• Red Herring Twist: A major part of the style of the game's storytelling is playing with this like crazy. It constantly sets concepts up, seems to build up to them, then swerves away, only to end up revealing something big after all.
  • Setsuna is convinced he has arrived from the future. After being established, the idea of time travel fades quickly into the background as the story turns into a fairly mundane Slice of Life exploration of the people who live on Urashima. The fact that Setsuna seems to have weirdly prophetic dreams and flashes becomes increasingly ignored as the story goes on. Time travel is never relevant to Karen's route. In Sara's route, time travel seems key to the resolution and the epilogue explains how it all worked out... only for it to reveal that there was no time travel at all, and just a character who had faked their death messing with you. The end of Rinne's route finally has some payoff, having Setsuna remember things from the other branches and uses them in an attempt to change history and fulfill what he believes he was there for. Then it reveals the method of time travel they thought they were using didn't exist at all. Just when you might think the story has contradicted itself about even having supernatural elements, the epilogue of the route finally sends Setsuna into another time era for real. By the end of the following route, it's clear that time travel really has been a key component of the story all along... and then the Golden Ending has a last-minute twist revealing that Setsuna has never been traveling through time after all, only being frozen and living through a series of nearly identical futures.
  • Kuon's identity is played with a lot. Early on, her Absurdly Youthful Mother and Mum Looks Like a Sister appearance traits can easily lead you into believing that her overly concealing clothes are to keep people from realizing that she and her daughter are actually the same person. The story has that exact situation being explicitly assumed by Sara about her own suspiciously identical mother, only to debunk and mock the very idea. You end up finding out that she conceals herself and keeps locked up because she has a disease that makes sunlight deadly to her. Except she actually doesn't, as you later learn that Kuon is not actually Kuon Ohara, but the Ohara's maid, who was made to take Kuon's identity to preserve the family when Kuon died, making it seem like her resemblance to Rinne was a massively coincidental Red Herring. However, in the end, even that proves to be a bit of a distraction from the full truth, that the Ohara's maid was Rinné all along, and Rinne being her daughter and not the Ohara's was a major part of the conspiracy to begin with.
• Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory: Averted. Setsuna invariably loses all his memories after each cryogenic trip. The trope is played straight after many, many trips, though.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The premise that drives a good chunk of the plot. The first half of Rinne's route concludes in tragedy due to the time travel shenanigans of her parents. So both of them concoct a plan to fix the mess with even more time traveling.
• Sins of Our Fathers: The skin disease is said to be a punishment on the island's citizens for the ancient Setsuna and Rinne's incestuous relationship.
• Stable Time Loop: Played with in several different ways. Setsuna wakes up on Urashima in 1999 with no memory other than a feeling that he needs to save 'Rinne' and kill 'Setsuna'. Setsuna's actions inadvertently doom Rinne, forcing him to take The Slow Path hoping to find a time machine so that he can avert this fate. Once in the future of 22016, he loses his memory again but meets a different Rinne who helps him build a time machine. Along the way his actions indirectly doom her world, so he changes his plans to kill himself (Setsuna) when he arrived in 22016 in order to save Rinne from the disaster his actions caused. The time machine 'overshoots', bringing him back to Urashima in 1999, with no memory other than a feeling that he needs to save 'Rinne' and kill 'Setsuna'. You can enforce this in the gameplay, as it is entirely possible to follow a path that infinitely repeats these events.
  • The loop is ultimately broken, with the implication that Setsuna has been through it so many times that the events are too ingrained in his mind, allowing him to finally make different choices upon returning to Urashima in 1999 in the Midsummer Route. It's further shattered to pieces when it's revealed that Setsuna has only ever been taking The Slow Path, he's never been traveling back in time, so the repetition of events has been due to history repeating itself rather than time travel fulfilling itself.
  • However, in Rinne's Route, Setsuna remembers details from Sara and Karen's Routes, which do not fit into the time loop. There are some implications Setsuna can remember things from endings in which he died as well. Coupled with the revelation in the Re: Ending that the cryo pod has been used by Setsunas and Rinnes with entirely different origins than any we see in the game, the implication is that even if Setsuna took a choice that led to a quick death, or even a death from old age happily living with one of the other girls, reincarnation would kick in to ensure that he would inevitably try his luck with Rinne again and repeat himself.
  • Invoked in Sara's route. Sara noticed in an old photo that her late mother had an absolutely uncannily Strong Family Resemblance to her, to the point of even sharing an unusual birthmark, and recognized that these things would be extremely unusual outside of fiction. She also knows that her parents met when her mother was sixteen, and Setsuna conveniently appears and claims to be a time traveler while she herself is sixteen. Sara becomes convinced that this is proof that she will be part of a Stable Time Loop where she and Setsuna go back in time and become her own parents. As it turns out, she's Wrong Genre Savvy. The birthmark is actually a brand, explaining how they could both have it, and her looking practically like a clone of her mother is simply a coincidence.
  • Invoked with the events on Boryujima. Sara convinces Rinne and Setsuna that Setsuna used time travel to meddle in the events Rinne experienced on Boryujima. When Rinne goes to change the events again to an outcome she prefers, her actions (specifically, hitting Setsuna over the head with a rock, giving him a wound similar to the one the original Setsuna was known to have received on Boryujima) temporarily convince Setsuna that they're not changing anything, but are in fact creating the exact situation they came to alter, creating a Stable Time Loop. To both of their varying disappointment, they discover that time travel was never involved and it was merely coincidental.
• Sweet Tooth: Mentioning desserts to Karen is an instant mood improver.
• Take a Third Option: Deconstructed with a vengeance in the Winter chapter. Trying to appease both neo-Avalon and the church is hard enough, but Setsuna neither has the knowledge of those organization's history or actual ability to make a change. This only leads to hurting both sides and the eventual destruction of the ISLAND.
• Teeny Weenie: Harisu mentions to Setsuna that the CD he used to cover up his private parts was a single. Later, he claims that other people on the island have begun to call him Single-kun.
• The Power of Love: Of the transcending time and space variety.
• Title Drop: Every 5 minutes.
• Temporal Mutability: Played with. Setsuna doesn't actually travel to the past. He simply freezes himself in a cryogenic tube and wakes up thousands of years later. It's always a one-way trip, however, so any changes he makes in the future are carried over to the next future he travels to. The RE: ending reveals that he has traveled to the future countless times and by extension, has introduced many changes into the timeline. So this is one of the most flexible examples of the trope.
• Temporal Paradox: The entire game is this. A rather complicated example but here we go. Rinne is the daughter of Rinne and S.Setsuna who came from the post apocalyptic past/future in a cryo-tube to Set Right What Once Went Wrong . Rinne lost her memories due to the cryo-sleep (although she remembers eventually) and later on assumed the identity of the late Ohara Kuon and gave her daughter Rinne the same surname. This Rinne met O.Setsuna (the original Setsuna and neglected Ohara's family son) and became friends with him. They later became stranded on a desert island. They find a boat but it only has room for one person. O.Setsuna finds the cryogenic tube, infers it can be used as a boat and puts Rinne in it. She makes it to Urashima and is found and woken up 4 years later, not having aged a day. O.Setsuna however, tries to use the boat to get back but dies from a head wound before he can. (the game tells you later that he is not related at all with the Setsuna you play with.) Instead, S.Setsuna who comes from the same period as Rinne washes up at Urashima with no memories and meets his daughter Rinne and Kuon. (Rinne in disguise) The game starts here and the events that unfold afterwards will be the catalyst to S.Setsuna's trip to the post apocalyptic past/future where he meets Rinne. As for S.Setsuna's origin, a good guess is that he is an alternate timeline Setsuna. Yes. Take a few minutes to let all that sink in.
  • Played with during Sara's route. She believes to have traveled to the past to save Urashima from disaster, changed her name to Maria (her mother's name), married a younger Setsuna and gave birth to her current 16 year old self. This is entirely off the mark though. In reality, Maria, her mother, left Urashima and staged her death to protect Sara. The family has issues.
  • Setsuna and Rinne become the paradox by brute force as the cryogenic tubes they both use allow them to meet again after several thousand years. The paradox is fittingly illustrated at the RE: Ending, where Setsuna realises there has been many Setsunas and Rinnes who have traveled through time to meet again.
• Time Machine: Of sorts. The cryo-tube (called "cold sleep machine" because why not?) is a one-way trip into the distant future. The actual time machine is a blueprint. We're left to wonder if it ever gets completed.
• The Ditz: Karen will believe whatever you tell her, no matter how silly, as long as it doesn't sound supernatural.
• The Klutz: Setsuna. Seriously, how can he manage to mess up so many chores?
• The Plague: Soot-blight Syndrome, A mysterious disease endemic to Urashima has afflicted its citizens and befuddled scientists for generations and is the reason why the island is cut-off from Japan's mainland.
  • The origin of the disease is later explained during the Winter chapter and is revealed to have been spawned by humanity's lack of exposure to the sun during the many ice ages that devastate the planet every 20,000 years. Sudden and extended exposure to sunlight after generations of underground life is effectively fatal for those susceptible to it. To make matters worse, the disease is hereditary and still affects people in the future, even when the ice age is long over.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: Karen to Sara, because she resents Sara for rejecting Moritsugu's adoption offer, forcing her to inherit the family title.
• The Runaway: Karen, at the beginning of the game. Until Setsuna spoils her plan, anyway. She applies to be a maid at Rinne's house to fund her runaway.
• Sneeze Cut: When Karen is talking to Tarou about her friends An, Emiri and Mei, all three of them sneeze right after the other while at some hot springs. They quickly deduce who's talking about them and Karen sneezes in return.
• Those Three Girls: Emiri, An and Mei are always seen together.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Sara and corn. So much that Karen gives her bags of corn as presents, and she still wants more at Ryuuguu.
• Useless Protagonist: Inverted. Setsuna has a massive inferiority complex and indulges in it right to the end. Uran echoes him from time to time, but this never really cements itself. Setsuna is not useless at all. He's educated, intelligent, has social skills, manages to land well paid jobs and is well loved by those he involves himself with. Yet several characters demean and undermine him. His monologues are quite pessimistic and this doesn't really change until very late in the game.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Setsuna. He lacks common sense, confidence and productivity. Most of the time his meddling is ill-timed or pointless. Worse is, that he is always well aware of his shortcomings, yet he never works to correct them.